When I was a kid, probably about 7
years old I started taking piano lessons from a very old woman, Mrs.
Ellen Gaines, who turned out to be an excellent teacher. In the
couple years I took lessons from her I made up my first song "Sleepy
Time Lullaby." Rhyming to music struck me as a very neat thing,
but then I got into adolescence and gave it all up. My Dad, Louie
Kostelec sang and played guitar, old prison and cowboy and train songs.
Though I liked his songs when I started playing around with the guitar
in the last year of high school I neglected to try to play along with
him, until one day in the Spring of 1974, I got the courage to do so,
and it was fun. I would have done it again but he died suddenly a
couple weeks later. It was that time of shock and
grief that got me serious about songs and about learning how to sing and
play. First I learned the songs he had been singing. in private
where no one could hear.
Then I wrote a
song called You Died Before Your Time, about him, my first real
piece
I suppose. It is the last tune on WORKING MAN.
I came across a record in a used record store, a tribute album to Woody
Guthrie. It was a revelation. I was hooked. It had the familiarity of family, no doubt at
least partly due to my Dad's singing and playing.
I come from a blue collar town, worked in the blue collar refineries and
chemical plants and I built earthmover parts at Caterpillar Tractor in
Joliet. The local economy went to Hell and I went back to
school. I ended up getting a Ph.D. in Religion but I have
not lost the feel of the factory and what it means to be in a union nor
forgotten just how dirty and tired a man can get. I try to keep that in
my songs. In the songs I remember the people I've known, the workers who
sweated beside me, the homeless men in their ragged tents under the
bridge along the Spokane River, or the sometimes only half sane people who were my
neighbors. The stories in the songs come from life, not always
mine, but real life nevertheless. It's an age of the demise of the
American worker, the loss of corporate values and the stealing away of
basic freedoms. We've all got to do what we can to fight these things
and I try to use music and rhymes; another legacy from Woody
Guthrie and all the other men and women who complained in song and
story.
Recording
In
the basement of our old house we built some walls, sheet rocked walls
and ceiling, ran a good electrical circuit and laid down a pretty flat
concrete floor. Adding a computer, a rack with a few good
components and a couple of nice vocal mikes, and for under $3000 we have
a functioning Cherry Street Studios. We recorded most of the
material for our three albums in this studio. Some earlier pieces
were recorded in the dining room. There's a rug on the floor,
table and freestanding lamps a bookcase and those old stone walls,
basalt and mortar. Oh, and there's our collection of wine, butted up
against the stone and keeping cool. A small couch makes it feel like a
living room, with guitars and banjo and mandolin etc. on stands, and
cables neatly strung across the low ceiling. Our friends like the
studio. It's got character. So do our friends.
Bill Kostelec, March 2005
The Rathdrum Prairie Refueling Depot
Disaster
is about a real life and very
frightening example of corporate power and its callous disregard for the
lives and well being of over 400,000 people who rely on the Rathdrum
Prairie aquifer for their fresh water. http://www.utu.org/worksite/detail_news.cfm?ArticleID=20975
this link is to an associated Press story that talks about the song.
Blessed are the Peacemakers, the Rachel Corrie Story
is a song from 2004, that I wrote for the first
anniversary of the death of
Rachel Corrie, an American college student who attended Evergreen
College here in Washington State. As part of a peace movement, she
was in Gaza trying to stop an Israeli bulldozer from flattening the home
of a medical doctor. The Caterpillar bulldozer knocked her down and
rolled over her, then backed up and rolled over her again. The
news media has paid little attention to this tragedy and even less to
the American government's failure to pursue the matter.
This song
appears on our first album, Railroad Boy.
Dugout Dick, whose real name is
Richard Zimmerman, has lived a hermit life along the Salmon River in
Idaho since the 1940's, and dug caves in the side of the hill above his
orchard in which he continues to live, and puts up guests. We
visited him in May of 2004 and again in May of 2006. Dick used to play guitar, harmonica
and sing, many of the same train and prison songs my Dad sang. My
song,
Dugout Dick,
was written on the drive after leaving his homestead. It appears on our
Working Man album.
Transport is a
little meditation on the war in Iraq. Not political in any obvious
way, it rather looks at a vignette of life going on while someone's
tragedy is unfolding. It is a Mother's tragedy. Transport is on
our Working Man cd.
Fairmont, 1969, is a recent song. I
finished it the first week of May, 2005. A song that I've been thinking about
a long time, it is a series of vignettes from a neighborhood that began
a few blocks from the house I grew up in. I've been haunted by
these things, by the mixing of memories and experiences in a time when
race was pushed to the forefront of our consciousness, when I first got
to know black kids by name, when black boys, white boys, and Mexican-American
boys all ended up in the same Army, same war. This song will
appear on Storyteller 2, due out in the Spring of 2007.
In
January of 2006 there came news of some miners trapped by an explosion
in a coal mine in West Virginia. The morning of the grim discovery of
the dead I wrote the song "Same Old Story." It runs over seven minutes
when we perform it but it goes so fast for us, because we get hooked
over and over again by the story itself. So do our audiences.
There are some songwriters that, in my
book, remain especially notable and worthy of emulating. John
Prine, like me, from the Chicago area, remains my favorite contemporary
songwriter. His ability to set a scene visually, and his working man
cynicism is inspiring. So is the fact that he does write about
things beyond boy-girl romantic issues. I know people like love songs
and break-up songs and cheating songs, but when over 95% of all pop
songs are about those things, that discourages someone like me, who
thinks that a song can actually deal with the rest of life and its
issues. But then I think LOVE is a bigger issue than finding somebody to
sleep with. Townes Van Zandt, while on his self-destructive
alcoholic road wrote a dozen spectacular songs also stands high in my
songwriters' pantheon. Woody Guthrie himself, with his variety of
music from political to children's' songs, with wordplay games and
sing-song rhythms and a level of verbal cleverness that is unmatched,
remains for me the best of the folk songwriters. As a founding
member of the Spokane Songwriters Circle I have been involved in seeking
and encouraging local songwriters to present their work to an audience
and that has been a revelation. If you think that all the good
musical talent gets well known commercially and nationally then you
could be in for a revelation. Listen to Laddie Ray Melvin's "Song
for Jimmy" or Jim Faddis' (of Prairie Flyer) song "The Dust of
Oklahoma", or Dave McRae's (of Sidetrack) "Road Waltz" or Steve
Schennum's (of The Occasional String Band) "Just Like You" or Kevin
Brown's (of Big Red Barn) "Medicine Bow" to hear lyrics and
melodies that are better than most commercial pop releases. There are, I
am sure, songwriters of great talent all over the country with virtually
no audience because we have become so accustomed to reducing our range
of music to pop radio and big label commercial releases. Here in
Spokane our Songwriters organization is in a small way trying to change
that.
December 2006